WITH the publication in English of The Dialogiclm.agination in 1981, Bakhtin came to be acknowledged as a major critic of our times. As Raina demonstrates in his article, he established his unique position vis-a-vis the structuralist approach as also vis-a-vis the more orthodox Lukacsian view of the novel and the epic. It w^as Bakhtin who sounded a radically different language in Russian criticism. Bakhtinian ways of seeing literature need close and continuous study. We hope Rama's essay w^ould be the first of a series of studies.

Christa Wolf is an outstanding writer of fiction in East Germany. She created quite a storm by taking an almost feminist anschauung in her interpretation of the Cassandra myth and in her Frankfurt lectures on Aesthetics delivered in Western Germany. Greece has always held a peculiar and rather special position in the European mind. Hegel had attempted a translation of a Greek tragedy. Heidegger could not think of philosophy without Greece. Wolfs journey into history has thus a long geneology. That does not, however, mean that Wolf has come out with an alternative aesthetics in keeping with the European as also specifically German tradition of the 'Critique'. Nevertheless, Wolfs exercise in tracing our fall from the glorious Greek civilisation into the contem-